[From Ralph D. Paine, Roads of Adventure (1922), pp. 389-411.]

 

XXXIX

GOLD CAMPS OF THE DESERT

 

            IT was believed that the American frontier would never see another great gold stampede, but the old prospectors, with the clamor of Cripple Creek still echoing in memory, wagged their gray beards with a knowing air, and trudged off into desert and mountain, confident that new bonanzas were waiting to be revealed. Nevada had been stripped of its fabulous treasure. Silver camps which had been roaring cities in the days of the Comstock Lode were mere ruined hamlets, tenantless and forlorn. Such newspaper jests as this were popular :

            "Three hoboes were thrown off a train while crossing the Nevada desert the other day. Their arrival doubled the population of the county in which they hit the alkali, and a real estate boom has been started on the strength of it."

            In 1900 a desert rancher named Jim Butler was prospecting in the southern Nevada desert, a hundred and fifty miles from a railroad, in a country which an experienced miner would have laughed at. It had none of the signs of gold- bearing rock, but in his fool ignorance Jim Butler rambled along "forty miles from water and one mile from hell," without making a strike big enough to stake him to chewing tobacco. He camped one night at Tonapah Spring and found some rock that looked good to him. He broke off a few chunks, loaded them on a burro, and plodded home to his ranch near Belmont.

            There his ore samples were greeted with light-hearted incredulity and he was about to throw them away when a young lawyer named Oddie pricked up his ears and offered to have the rock assayed. Jim Butler betook himself to the more important task of harvesting his hay. He had forgotten

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about his ore until Oddie sent him word that the stuff assayed six hundred dollars a ton in gold and silver.

            A few months later the news was sifting to the outside world that the most God-forsaken corner of the Nevada desert, down near Death Valley, was full of gold. The rush began from far and wide. Almost in a twinkling Tonapah was a roaring, old-time gold camp, and as swiftly it was transformed into an orderly city of four thousand people. Then the torrent of adventurers swirled south to seek new claims, farther into the heart of the desert, where they could travel two hundred miles and find no town, no human settlement, where nothing grew but sagebrush, cactus, and mesquite. Water, fuel, everything had to be freighted through the mountain passes across the wastes of burning sand where many men died of thirst.

            In this forbidding wilderness, Goldfield became the center of another frenzy of activity, and, presto, it bragged of ten thousand population, most of them living in tents and rude shacks. Still the prospectors pushed onward into the heart of the desert until they reached the Bullfrog district. When gold was found there, only three families were living within sixty miles of the location, two ranchers who had settled beside the springs, and a Shoshone Indian named Panamint Joe. Soon there was a string of new-fledged towns, Bullfrog, Beatty, Rhyolite, linked with the distant railroad by lines of automobiles, stages, and toiling trains of freighters' wagons. And there you found a new breed of frontiersman, the desert chauffeur.

            "I can spot one of those desert automobile drivers as far as I can see him," a man in Goldfield told me. "After he has been at it a while, he looks like a sheep-herder. He gets that locoed look on his face, and the same kind of a wild stare, and you could n't get the dust out of his system if you ran him through a stamp-mill."

            Nowhere, save in war, have so many costly, high-powered

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machines been wrecked as over that stretch of lonely desert between Goldfield and Bullfrog when there was not even a semblance of a road. When I made the trip, in quest of magazine material, it was like putting to sea in a flat- bottomed skiff. The law of the survival of the fittest had wrought its pitiless work among the battered automobiles, and from the wreckage loomed the commanding figure of Bill Brown, the only driver who guaranteed to get you there, whether his car held together or not.

            He had rebuilt this cruiser several times. So little of the original material was left that she suggested the present condition of the frigate Constitution. Tossing aside the body to save weight, Bill Brown had built a new one from bits of packing-cases. Water-kegs, cans of oil and gasoline, spare parts and tires were strapped and tied on from bow to stern. Rusty and patched and gaunt, the machine seemed native to the desert after Bill Brown had fashioned her to his liking. He had undergone a similar transformation. No longer a dapper, liveried driver on city boulevards, he was a dusty, vagabondish, self-reliant fighter against odds.

            He was seldom more than twelve hours on the trail to Bullfrog. If the machine escaped disaster, he was likely to do it in half the time. Other drivers had been stranded for days and nights in the blazing desolation between the two ports.

            His road so-called, twisted through canons or lava-strewn plains, across the bottom of dead lakes, and through sand that buried his tires. The steering-wheel was never still as he snaked his bucking bronco of a car through the amazingly rough going while passengers speculated, when bounced in air, whether they would come down in or out of the packing-box tonneau. I missed it once, landing astern of the old boat, but the sand was soft and Bill Brown was kind enough to stop and pick me up, although my fare had been paid in advance.

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            Twenty miles from anywhere we passed a tent which bore the legend: "Saloon and Restaurant." Another sign informed the public that this tent was the town of "Cuprite," and that its reason for being was "First Shipment, $236 per Ton." Many tons of it would have been required to hold the average man more than five minutes in Cuprite, but the population of four citizens was profanely cheerful. Far ahead, a dust-cloud marked the crawling progress of a freight outfit hauling hay and lumber to Bullfrog, making the trip in five days.

            Against the background of sand and mountain gleamed a little lake. It was framed in wet marsh and green undergrowth. Tall trees marched behind it. Presently the machine stormed over this patch of desert, and there was nothing but dazzling white soda and clumps of sagebrush. This dry lake, whence the mirage had fled, was as smooth and hard as asphalt, and for a mile or so Bill Brown let her go, and it was like flying after the pitching and bucking on the untamed desert.

            "I made the trip at night during the summer," said he. "It was too hot in the daytime when she hit a hundred and twenty in the shade sometimes. Driving this country in the dark did give you a run for your money; you could n't help cavortin' over the rocks now and then. But I've been lucky. I never did have to walk forty miles for help and leave my passengers all sprawled out to get fried on both sides."

            The car stopped with an ominous rattle and groan. It appeared that Bill Brown had boasted too soon. He climbed down and looked his battle-scarred veteran over. A freight outfit was passing, a few hundred yards distant. Thither hastened the resourceful Bill Brown and returned with a few feet of wire which he had purloined from a bale of hay. With temper unruffled he burrowed under the car in the stifling dust, hitched her together again, and she bounded away with renewed and headlong enthusiasm.

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            Ten miles from the camp of Beatty, we essayed to jump a gulley at a gait of thirty miles an hour. There was a crash and a spill in which the three passengers were dumped overside upon their several heads. Bill Brown rolled out like a shot rabbit and scrambled to his feet to survey what looked like a total wreck. A rear axle had snapped in twain and one wheel had rolled on down the gully. A civilized driver might have thrown up his hands and waited to be towed into harbor. The passengers gazed mournfully across the desert and thought of the ten-mile walk. But Bill Brown remarked, with the air of a man who had no troubles whatever:

            " This don't amount to shucks. You folks just loaf around and enjoy the scenery for half an hour, and then we 'll go on our way rejoicing."

            He extracted a spare axle, jacks and wrenches, from his machine shop under the seats, collected a few rocks of handy size, and hummed a little song while he toiled. The rear of the car was jacked up on a stone underpinning, the broken axle removed, and a new one inserted in thirty-five minutes by the watch.

            "I was a little bit slower than usual," apologized Bill. "This gully is an ornery place to break down in. You can't get under the machine without building up a rock-pile first."

            Again the old car buckled to her task and, with no more delays, rattled into Beatty. The camp was one long street of tents, and straggling away from them were tiny dwellings ingeniously walled with tin cracker boxes hammered out flat, or gunny sacks, or beer bottles set in adobe. Scores of dugouts burrowed into the hillsides. Lumber was a staggering luxury.

            Ringed about by painted mountains whose slopes were wondrously streaked with crimson and emerald, this new camp seemed vastly more remote from the world of men and cities than could be measured in miles of desert. The spirit of American enterprise was displayed in a hotel finished a

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few days earlier. It was a square frame building of two stories which towered like a sky-scraper in this huddle of tents and shacks. And one had to fare to this far corner of the country to find that welcome at an inn which urban customs have forgotten. Waiting on the porch was buxom Mrs. Casey, the landlord's wife, blowing a horn and cheerily shouting:

            "Tumble in, gents, and glad to see you. Dinner 's hot and waiting. Come into the best hotel in a hundred miles."

            A piano was busy in the parlor. A gentlemanly gambler spun a roulette wheel in the office. At the dining-room door stood a plump and ruddy waiter with a white mustache. This was an oasis in the desert. Mirabile dictu, at Casey's Hotel down near the edge of Death Valley, amid as ghastly an isolation of background as could be found, this was the menu that fended off starvation:

            "Utah celery, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, roast spring chicken, lettuce salad, corn on the cob, green apple pie, English plum pudding, apples and grapes, and fresh milk."

            In the evening Bill Brown limbered up the invincible gasoline chariot and drove me on to Bullfrog. The headlights expired during the journey, but Bill was not disturbed. He drove at top speed and occasionally lost his way. At such times the car careened on two wheels, came down with a grunt, and hurdled a few boulders.

            Bullfrog was the farthest outpost of settlement in the desert, a camp which was waiting and hoping for the railroad to creep nearer and haul its ore out. Beyond was the menace and mystery of the naked desert. The bones of a prospector who had died of thirst had just then been brought into camp. He had been a carpenter, earning high wages during the rush, but the gold fever had lured him. With a partner and a pair of burros he had trailed off southward toward the Death Valley country to prospect in the Funeral Range.

            Three weeks after the desert had swallowed them up, the

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partner wandered into a freighters' camp, half-crazed with thirst and exhaustion. He was able to tell the freighters that the carpenter was somewhere out yonder, lost and without water. A rescue party searched in vain. Sometime later prospectors stumbled across what was left of Griffith, the carpenter of Bullfrog. He had thrown away his gun, his canteen, his hat. One shoe was found thirty feet from the body, and he had torn off and flung away most of his clothing. There were the grisly tokens of the fight he had made to struggle on.

            "When they are dying for water," said Mitchell, the big, brick-red mining man who knew the desert, "they throw away everything, and often you find them without a stitch on."

            In Bullfrog I discovered that a stage-line had been recently strung across a stretch of a hundred and twenty-five miles of this desert, to connect the new gold camps with a southern railroad outlet at Las Vegas. It was a hardy, venturesome enterprise, backed by the Kimball brothers, two young men of the stuff which had conquered the old West. They came naturally by their liking for the stage business. Their father had been a partner in the Overland Mail when Ben Holliday was blazing a new highway across the continent.

            To operate this desert line the young Kimballs had to establish supply and water stations because there were only two springs on the long route, and not a human being excepting the lonely ranchers who dwelt at these two oases. Therefore three wells were driven so that water stations would be thirty or forty miles apart, and at these wells were pitched the tents of the station-keepers who fed and watered the change horses.

            There was no way traffic, and the revenues came from the mail contract and such passengers as went into the gold camps or came out at twenty -five dollars per head. Whether or not the young men gained profit, they were certain to earn

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the distinction of operating the longest, loneliest, and most forbidding stage-route in the United States.

            The stage picked me up at Bullfrog at five o'clock in the morning. The night was yet chill with that keen and windless air which comes as the breath of life to the desert. Here and there a canvas wall glimmered from a candlelight within. The little camp, cuddled in the rugged arms of the mountains, seemed singularly isolated and forlorn, so far was it from the permanent communities of men and women, so brave an outpost of a civilization which had almost out- grown this kind of pioneering.

            It needed the talk and stir of its rough-clad, sunburned men in the raw, new streets, and the noise of pick and shovel in the prospect holes that pitted the slopes, to detach it from this lifeless silence which brooded over the desert at the hour of dawn.

            There were no other passengers for the stage, and the driver welcomed me like a long-lost brother. He was not fond of driving his thirty-mile stretch alone. We passed out through a gap in the mountains which began to flush with the peculiar glory of the desert sunrise. In the wake of a shrouding haze of blue, which lingered briefly, came a roseate glow that touched first the crests of the mountains, then stole swiftly down their sides, and the day leaped into being.

            Soon we came to a camp that was a sort of tiny orphan sister of Bullfrog. It was called Gold Center. Gold had not been found there, and it was the center of nothing but desolation. Otherwise the name had been appropriately chosen. It was a bit of flotsam left by the wild tide of prospectors who had taken it for granted that gold was everywhere in these mountains. We delayed to pick up a lone pilgrim who was waiting at the canvas saloon, nicely named "The Last Chance." In a moment of ill-timed levity the driver remarked to the shaggy landlord:

            "How's things in Dead Center, old sport?"

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            "Dead Center, you big stiff!" indignantly snorted the leading citizen. "For two cents I'd pull you off that broken-down hearse and spill you all over Gold Center which is due to be the best camp in the State of Nevada. Busted prospectors that have to drive stages to get a grub-stake can't come round here passin' no such insults as Dead Center."

            The passenger clambered into the wagon and shook the dust of Gold Center from his battered boots. Slumping into the collar of his faded coat, he pulled over his eyes a hat so dilapidated that it in itself was eloquent of much desert wandering. He was a chunky, elderly man with a flaming countenance and a thatch of tow hair which had defied the years to turn it gray. Ever and anon this Bill Crump fished a bottle from his pocket, offered it to the driver, who always refused with a melancholy gesture, and drank a slug therefrom to keep the chill off.

            They were an oddly contrasting pair, the stout and garrulous Crump and the lanky stage-driver who was a man of a subdued, chastened manner, as if life had been a losing fight. Yet they were kindred spirits in that both had been rolling stones along the outer edges of civilization, and old age was overtaking them with naught to show for the long accumulation of years but an amazing variety of experiences.

            Bill Crump faced the future stoutly, with a flamboyant courage, and you could imagine his rum-soaked, sturdy figure shaking a fist at fortune in city and camp and desert, always making the best of it and letting to-morrow go hang. As for the stage-driver, he was and would be a man with a vision to the very end, industrious, sober, but never winning, and always moving on with an air of patient resignation to find the vision still beyond his grasp. He had been a miner, off and on, for thirty years, roaming from Nevada to Alaska, hoping now to save money for another outfit and a fresh fling at it. He had seen the partners of his youth make rich strikes and become the millionaires of Utah and Colorado. His own

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failures had not soured him. He believed that every man got a square deal sooner or later, and his turn would come.

            When the morning sun climbed clear of the curtaining mountains, the desert began to swim in a glare of heat. To the right ran the bare heights of the Charleston Range, while a few miles to the left was the grim Funeral Range beyond which lay Death Valley. Between the towering ranges was the desert over which the stage crawled like a black insect on a whitewashed floor. Through a notch in the Funeral Range we could gaze across Death Valley to other stark and chaotic barriers of mountains. This vista was hostile beyond expression.

            While the stage crept through the sand and the stifling dust-clouds at the deliberate gait of three miles an hour, there moved in the far distance another pillar of alkali powder, heralding the approach of a freight outfit. Very slowly there emerged from this gray veil the long string of eighteen mules, stepping out with brave and patient endurance, pulling the linked trail-wagons no more than a dozen miles in a day. The mule-skinner in the saddle and the swamper trudging alongside exchanged quiet greetings with the stage- driver, from the enveloping dust.

            "How goes it?"

            "Pretty good. How 's yourself?"

            It was like two ships speaking each other at sea. The freighters were ten days out from Las Vegas. One trail-wagon was loaded with hay and water-barrels, for they had to make dry camps between the wells. They moved over the face of the desert with a lonely and self-reliant composure.

            At noon we halted at a tent where there was a driven well. Here lived the keeper of the station with his wife. The nearest neighbor was thirty miles away. There was not a tree within a day's journey. But this cheerful, kindly, gray-haired man and his motherly wife said they liked the desert. Perhaps it was because their faces hinted that home is where

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the heart is. The heat beat down upon the shadeless tents as from a furnace, and the bitter, pervasive dust sifted into food and clothing and blankets, but these two found contentment in each other, and the inscrutable fascination of the desert had turned the edge of their hardships.

            A change of drivers was made, and a white-bearded patriarch turned back with us to drive over the same forty miles which he had covered northward-bound.

            "When you git back home," he chuckled as he picked up the reins, "you tell 'em you rode one stage with old Pop Gilbert that crossed the Plains with his dad a terrible long time ago, in the year of 1857. We set out with ox teams to go from Illinois to Californy, and it took us six months' travelin' to make it. Dad did n't like it out yonder on the coast, so he jes' hitched up his cattle and turned around and trailed back to Illinois. He was a kind o' sudden man by nature, dad was.

            "I'm still chipper for an old man, so I be. S'pose there's any chance for me to git a job with the Government survey outfit in Death Valley? There's one place where I ain't been yet. I don't mind hot weather, not a derned mite. I'm a desert lizard, so I be, and my hide is turned to leather."

            It seemed improbable that the danger of death should menace a trail rutted by the wheel-tracks of the stage, but in mid-afternoon we were given a glimpse of the implacable enmity of these waste places. The stage had plodded perhaps twenty miles beyond the noonday camp and the next station was about the same distance ahead. A solitary man was descried as staggering along the trail, now halting to throw himself flat in the sand, again scrambling on with weaker effort. Far in advance of him, mere dots on the horizon, were three other figures on foot.

            After a time the voice of the castaway floated back in faint, incoherent cries. He was so desperately intent on overtaking those far ahead of him that he paid no heed to

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the stage until it drew up beside him. Then he fell to his knees with wild gestures, gasping out husky, broken Spanish phrases. The dark face was caked with sweat and dust, the lips cracked and swollen, the eyes rimmed with red. Those vanishing dots beyond, he explained, were fellow Mexicans with whom he had set out to cross the desert from Bullfrog to Las Vegas. With only two canteens among them, their water had given out since leaving the last well. This one's strength had been the first to break and the others had callously abandoned him.

            The pitiable wretch was given a lift in the stage and a pull at the driver's big canteen. When the three cowardly Mexicans were overtaken, old Bill Crump cursed them in their own language, ripping out the deadliest Spanish insults with admirable ease and fluency. The canteens were filled for them and then the deserted one was dumped overboard to shift for himself.

            Of different metal was the leathery old prospector met later in the day. He was really an amazing figure of a man. Bent and partly crippled with rheumatism, he was braving it alone, with no burros, and not even a blanket roll on his back. He had not a cent in his pockets, and his outfit consisted of a canteen and a paper parcel of bacon and biscuit given him by a friendly freighter. While the stage horses halted to rest, the old man chatted amiably and explained whither he was bound.

            He had been working a claim in the Funeral Range through the summer, and, his grub-stake having run out, he was footing it in to the mining camps to look for work to tide him over the winter. He pulled a few bits of rock from his pocket, smiled with the most radiant confidence, and said the samples surely did look elegant to him. He proposed to save enough money to outfit in the spring and return to his mountain solitude. This indomitable old wayfarer preached a concrete gospel of faith, hope, and works.

GOLD CAMPS OF THE DESERT 401

            He was of the breed of the old-timer discovered on a hillside beyond a dry wash, where he was sinking a shaft to develop his prospect. A white heap of rock, a hole, and a hand windlass and bucket marked the scene of his back breaking endeavors. He was sharpening a pick at his little forge, and as he smote the red steel with his hammer and thrust it hissing into a water bucket, he talked with the clang of his tools for punctuation. He was wrinkled and he wore spectacles and the hinges of his back were permanently crooked. But his face reflected a serene and tolerant spirit. Life had hammered and tempered him upon its own anvil.

            "I've tried it 'most every wheres," said he - "all over the West, and in Australia (bang, bang) and I tried it once in South Africa and I made two big strikes in my time - (thump, thump) I'm going down a hundred feet here and if I don't find it then, I 'll quit (bang, bang) and try somewheres else. The surface rock looks promisin' to me it 's hard work, but I dunno as I 'd care to be doin' anything else sort of gets hold of a man so he ain't happy unless he's miserable and disappointed (thump, thump)."

            In the early evening the stage toiled through a canon and found a tent inhabited by a peevish youth in charge of a dry camp.

            "I've watered your fresh team of hosses," he protested, "and you kin hook 'em up, but they drunk every last drop I had, and there ain't enough left to make a pot of coffee. If you don't send me back a barrel from Indian Spring in the morning, I 'm up against it good and plenty. I ain't no kicker, but likewise I ain't no horned toad."

 

XL

THE COMPOSURE OF ANTONIO APACHE

 

            As the stage crept on late into the night over a rolling and broken landscape, the darkness conjured many illusions and fantasies. We seemed always to be climbing the white trail which streaked the gloom, even when the desert had a downward tilt. One could see, or thought he saw, houses, railroad grades, even trains of cars. These were only the shadowed shapes of bleak buttes and uncouth fragments of hills which had been gashed by cloud-bursts roaring down from the distant mountains.

            The Joshua trees, distorted caricatures of verdure, became clothed with an uncanny vagueness of aspect. Their spiked, twisted limbs took on the shapes of men crawling over the sand or crouching in wait, or gesturing in threat and appeal. All sense of proportion had vanished with the sunset. One's eyes were no longer to be regarded as in the least trustworthy. A low-hung star, hidden behind the rugged crest of a mountain wash, cast a reflection upward which so wonderfully imitated the glow of a distant camp-fire that a lost tenderfoot would have struggled toward it.

            Strange how this American desert casts a spell over the minds of men that have known it! Long after midnight we came to a grove of whispering trees around a living spring, the first oasis in twenty hours of unbroken travel from Bull- frog. It was as grateful a resting-place as ever the school-day geographies pictured of a palm-fringed well in the Sahara. The rancher who came out to welcome us was a down-easter from Vermont. In the midst of this stupendous desolation, almost fifty miles from a town or a railroad, the

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blessed miracle of water enabled him to grow green crops and feed a herd of cattle.

            "I went back to New England last year for a little vacation," said he, "but I did n't hanker to stay there. I never saw anything look prettier to me than this place when I drove in again."

            Drowsily, with aching bones, I stumbled into a tent. Twenty hours of bumping in that Concord wagon had made it a long day. While blissfully off to sleep in the blankets, there recurred to mind another desert journey quite different from this, in North China in the dead of winter, with a cruel sand-storm raging and the temperature near zero.

            It had been one of Ralph Paine's foolish adventures, setting out with two Chinese servants and a mule-cart to discover whether the region was really pacified and cleared of hostile Boxers and bandits. German punitive columns, so-called, consisting of several thousand troops, had been marching out from Peking to pillage and burn and slay, their commanders declaring the country to be still seething with rebellion and danger to foreigners. This was mostly untrue.

            This personal expedition two Chinese boys, a dun mule, and an inquisitive correspondent had come to the border of a small desert some forty miles to the westward of Peking. It rolled like a glittering sea beyond the last walled village. A few hours after beginning to cross this stretch of desert, the wind came whooping down with the icy breath of the Mongolian steppes from whence it blew. The gray sky closed down to meet the leaping billows of sand. So dense was this driving smother that it was like a yellow fog. The very ridges and hillocks shifted with a complaining roar, and the shriek of the wind was pierced by a shrill, rasping sound like the commotion of clouds of steel filings.

            This moving sand, the flinty particles pelting in sheets, was enough to choke a man, in a little while to bury him alive. Ralph Paine and his two Chinese companions were not only

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stifled, but also benumbed with the searching cold, and all sense of direction was lost. And then, by luck, they had blundered into a Mongolian caravan snugly encamped against the storm, the black tents pitched in the lee of the shaggy, cowering camels. And the hospitable men from the north had filled the castaways full of boiling tea and bundled them in evil-smelling furs.

            In finding a lodging for the night in the oasis of the Nevada desert, there was somewhat of this same sense of ineffable ease and comfort and security. There had been no danger and only small discomfort, but the contentment in the snug refuge from the desert was hauntingly vivid. And to this day I wish I had lingered a week or so with that pleasant rancher from Vermont to have seen the leisurely freight outfits find harbor for the night and resume the long voyage, and the prospectors wandering in with their laden burros, and the strange life of the desert as it touched this green islet. But we stupid mortals, or most of us, are always in haste to reach somewhere else, forgetting that the zest is in the journey and not in the destination.

            After breakfast next morning the stage pulled out for another dusty day of it, hoping to arrive in Las Vegas before night. At about noon it was our good fortune to encounter the most sensational and notorious person in that whole desert country. He had been the subject of gossip and conjecture all along the route, and here was none other than "Scotty" himself, on foot with two burros, one of which had a sack of ore lashed across its back. Presumably he was coming out of Death Valley where he was alleged to have discovered gold beyond the dreams of avarice. A vagrant cow-puncher and desert rat with a riotous imagination, Scotty had juggled fact and fancy until the shrewdest men in Nevada were puzzled to know whether he had found a mine or was squandering funds cajoled from credulous capitalists.

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            He had actually made New York sit up and take notice by hiring a special train to carry him from the Pacific coast at record speed, "just to give Broadway a whirl." Headlines had blazoned his tour. Scouts and spies had been employed to follow him back to the desert in the hope of discovering where he had found his gold.

            This was the bizarre adventurer who exchanged noisy greetings with the stage-driver, and, after a few questions, gustily announced:

            "I'm due to give 'em another splash with a special train. This time is where I bluff old Harriman out of his boots. I just as lief bet him fifty thousand dollars I can beat him in a race from the Coast to Chicago, me buyin' a special on the Santa Fe and that old figger-head makin' his play on the Union Pacific. But I 'm afraid he 'll take water.

            "They say I've killed fifteen men just to see 'em kick," continued Scotty, cocking his hat over one eye. "It ain't so. I would n't do no such thing. They don't know me. I fool 'em all. I 've got a pair of glasses that can see fifty miles, and a gun that shoots five miles, and when they try to trail me to Death Valley I run blazers on 'em. Yes, you can tell 'em all that Scotty is due for another little race down the pike behind a Santa Fe engine. Maybe I 've got a mine and maybe not. And maybe I ain't got a cent to my name. Keep 'em guessin', hey, boy?"

            This was not the last seen of Scotty. From Las Vegas I went to Los Angeles, and there met, by chance, an old and dear friend, Antonio Apache. He was a full-blooded Indian of the Apache tribe who, as an infant, had been saved alive in one of the last battles of the great chief Cochise against the cavalry forces of the Regular Army. Adopted by people of wealth, Antonio had enjoyed the advantages of travel and education, including courses at Harvard. Black-haired, broad-shouldered, standing taller than six feet, he was as fine an Indian as ever Fenimore Cooper portrayed.

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            It was agreeable to find him in Los Angeles, and while we were together he disclosed his business, part of which was to investigate the meteoric Scotty in behalf of a New York banker who had advanced him eight thousand dollars under a grub-stake contract. This money was to be used to develop the mysterious mining properties which Scotty claimed to have found in the Nevada desert. It was suspected that this money had been burned up in the flaming affluence which regarded hiring special trains as the merest trifle.

            As an agent, Antonio Apache was an excellent choice. He knew the desert, and his manner and appearance suggested that it might be bad medicine to attempt to "run blazers" on him.

            Shortly after my arrival it was rumored that Scotty was heading for Los Angeles, on the war-path, determined to wipe out the big Indian who was meddling in his affairs. This sounded auspicious. Here were two men who might confidently be expected to furnish an episode of the vanishing West. It was worth waiting for. My money was on Antonio Apache who looked forward to the collision with tranquil amusement.

            The gold camps had been disappointing with respect to battle and sudden death. Bad men had flocked in, but they were neatly and swiftly suppressed. Wyatt Earp and his brother Virgil had joined the rush to the Goldfield district, perhaps hoping that the frontier had come back to them. They had been heroes of bloody frays in Tombstone in its palmiest days. Their fight to a finish with the McClowries and the Clantons had been one of the epics of the border. And now, in their declining years, Wyatt Earp had died in the miners' hospital in Goldfield, with his boots on, after a most prosaic illness. Virgil Earp ran a little saloon in Tonapah for a while and then moved on. Once he flourished his guns while drunk and they were rudely taken away from him by a runt of a deputy sheriff.

THE COMPOSURE OF ANTONIO APACHE 407

            Of the veterans of the Klondike who had followed the stampede into Goldfield, the most rampantly picturesque character was "Diamondfield Jack" Davis. While mining in Idaho, he had achieved the unique distinction of being three times scheduled to be hanged for the alleged murder of two men in a labor war. Twice reprieved, things had looked black for "Diamondfield Jack" when the fatal day rolled round again. His enemies had cut the telegraph wires so that the Governor's message could not be transmitted in time to forestall the deadly activity of the sheriff. The document was hustled along by relays of pony riders, and the last horseman spurred his foaming steed up to the gallows in time to see the noose encircle the neck of "Diamondfield Jack."

            He was treated with deference in Goldfield, but his demeanor was quiet and his habits industrious. He displayed his fighting spirit only when an I.W.W. mob had attempted to wreck the office of a courageous young newspaper editor. Then "Diamondfield Jack" had unbelted two revolvers of horrendous caliber, shoved them into the faces of the armed mob, and addressed them in these eloquent words:

            "Now, you bunch of yellow dogs, I'll give you until I count twenty-three to beat it."

            With the law and order of the gold camps rippled only by an occasional breeze of this description, it was a genuine treat to contemplate an affair between the saturnine and capable Antonio Apache and the fire-eating Scotty of the desert.

            "How about it, Antonio?" said I, while we sat at dinner. "Am I to smell powder-smoke? If so, what about the casual bystander who usually gets potted? Far be it from me to quit a pal, but -

            " Scotty is a four-flusher," answered the tall Indian, with an air slightly bored. "It depends somewhat on whether he is drunk or sober when we run into him. If he is full of booze,

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he may start something. But a poke on the jaw will be enough, I imagine. He flourishes a gun in those desert camps, but the Los Angeles police would lock him up."

            "Has he a mine? What is your information on that?" "He bluffed those New Yorkers into thinking so. And they put up real money. However, that doesn't mean much. Extracting coin for a mining proposition from those wise New York capitalists is like stealing pennies from a child. I'd be ashamed to try it."

            Among my clippings I find one from a Los Angeles newspaper which sketchily describes what occurred when these two antagonists of the border faced each other.

            Walter Scott, of the mysterious Death Valley mine, and Antonio Apache, representing Mr. Girard's interest in the claim, conversed in the lobby of the Hotel Lankershim last night. The interview passed off peaceably, but for forty minutes there was enough suppressed excitement in the hotel to blow the roof off. Every bell-boy, the night clerk, and the cigar-stand man drew a few short breaths when Scotty, blue shut, red necktie, and all, swung into the lobby.

            Antonio Apache, sitting in the lobby, was talking with Ralph D. Paine, the war correspondent. There were few guests who had not heard of the feud between the two men, each unique in his way. The word spread, and people gathered in groups, at discreet distances, to watch the conference. They expected every minute to see a fight which Jack London would be proud to describe.

            But there was nothing doing. Scotty breezed over and began to argue in a cheerful way, once or twice skating on thin ice. He had a grievance, but did n't propose to shed blood for it. Antonio Apache smoked a cigar, occasionally taking it out of his mouth to contradict some statement in accents calm but firm.

            Scotty walked over to buy himself a cigar and returned to argue on some new tack. As a widely advertised show, the audience considered it a frost. Scotty 's reputation suffered severely, as he had publicly announced that he proposed to scalp the big Indian or chase him out of town. He had not the slightest intention of doing either as soon as he went up against Antonio Apache who is known to be a well-organized young man.

THE COMPOSURE OF ANTONIO APACHE 409

            It was very much of an anti-climax, as you will perceive. The dialogue was constrained, but exceedingly polite. Antonio was always the gentleman and his voice was suave as he exclaimed :

            "But, really, Scotty, I have had nothing whatever to do with the stories circulated about you."

            "Well, I'll tell you, boy," replied the man from Death Valley, "I'm this kind of a guy. If I find I'm mistaken, I ain't ashamed to take off my hat and offer the glad hand."

            "Very nice of you, I am sure, Scotty. What about showing me your mine? I am speaking for the half-owner of your claims, you understand."

            "Tell your boss I'll give him his money back for it when- ever he hollers for it, Apache. And I 'll show him the mine if he wants to come out here himself."

            "That is fair enough, Scotty. But you bar me?"

            " Yes, because you think you are foxy enough to out-guess me. You had a couple of men after me, up around Ballarat, but I put the long-range glasses on 'em. On the level, did n't you put them newspaper birds up to sayin' I killed men just to see 'em kick? "

            "No, Scotty, not I," returned the tall Apache, without a smile. " You would never harm anybody. As a bad man, you are a counterfeit."

            The four-flusher comprehended the insult, but failed to resent it. Here was the overt challenge, but he let it pass. A flush dyed his commonplace features, he glanced aside to see whether the spectators had overheard, and then exclaimed, with an awkward laugh :

            "That's right, old man. I aim to be a decent citizen. You'll hear lots of stuff about Scotty that ain't so."

            The remainder of the interview was inconsequential. Scotty 's bluff had been called, and he knew it. He was a dampened fuse. After some blustering about his special trains and millions of dollars to burn, he sauntered to the

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hotel bar. Antonio Apache yawned behind his hand and we adjourned to the cafe for a late supper.

            "What is the answer?" said I. "You never tell all you know"

            "Oh, about Scotty?" smiled my copper-skinned friend. "Well, of course, that special, record-breaking train was excellent advertising for the Santa Fe. It did n't cost Scotty much. And he has been spending some of the stake that was given him for development work. Does that explain part of it?"

            " Then you have n't tried to trail him to the desert? "

            "He has not fooled me to any great extent. I still keep in touch with my own people, the Arizona Apaches, and they are glad to send help when there is trailing to be done. Could Scotty keep a mine in Death Valley hidden from them very long? Yes, this noisy desert rat has some good claims not at all as rich as he pretends them to be and I fancy I can look after the interests of my employer in New York."

            "Then most of it is loud talk and imagination, Antonio?"

            "An artistic temperament, and perhaps a clever press agent."

            Sadly I glanced at these headlines next morning:

SCOTTY MEETS APACHE

-----

GUESTS IN LOBBY OF LANKERSHIM ARE AGHAST WHEN DEATH VALLEY

COWBOY MEETS THE INDIAN FACE TO FACE

            There was nothing in it for a war correspondent. Alas, Scotty had been sober!